Wacton – All Saints Church

The Grade I listed All Saints Church in Wacton looks a little bit odd, a grand fourteenth century combined nave and chancel (which were once thatched), alongside a tower which is possibly late Saxon and which was reconstructed in the twelfth century.

The south side of the church. This village was once known as Wacton Magna, and there was a smaller settlement nearby called Wacton Parva, which both had their own churches. However, the latter settlement became smaller following the Black Death and their church stopped being used for services in around 1500 and it fell down in the decades that followed.

The north side of the church and the join between the tower and the nave.

The tower has an odd two tier arrangement going on, where the top section is narrower.

It’s not entirely clear to see on the photo, but a fair chunk of the glasswork is bent out of shape.

The chancel window, which was altered in the seventeenth century and restored in the nineteenth century.

The chunky south door with some old ironwork, but, no porch. This also isn’t a situation where the porch fell down, or someone pinched it or whatever, the church just never had one. This whole building is a mystery to me and there doesn’t seem to be that much history of the structure available on-line. So, this means I’ll have to make it up based on my very sketchy knowledge of church history.

We know that the church was rebuilt in the fourteenth century, not least as the earlier tower is still standing. There’s also the not inconsequential matter of the Black Death which took place between around 1350 and this caused a slowdown in church building, as there was less money to pay for things and a lack of craftsmen to build things. Church towers were often replaced when finances allowed and the local residents would have wanted a decent one to look better than neighbouring villages, and it’s clear that there was some money to pay for the grand new nave and chancel.

This all suggests to me (and, this is likely entirely nonsense, but it’s a theory and I’m sticking with it) that the tower would have been replaced in the late fourteenth century if the Black Death hadn’t taken place. By the time that it had, there wasn’t the money available and there was some steady depopulation in this area, evident by the subsequent merging of the two Wacton parishes into one. This suggests that the planned porch and the planned new tower just never got built, and then money wasn’t available. There was often relatively little substantial work done to churches between the late Tudor period and the Victorian period, which meant that All Saints was never entirely completed. What was there in around 1350 is still there over 650 years later, which is the speed that the Anglia Square project in Norwich seems to be moving at. But that’s another story.

Simon Knott notes that this church is not easy to get into, although there was a sign which mentioned that private prayer was possible on Thursdays between 09:00 and 16:00. I hope that when normality resumes the building is flung open to the community in the way that the Church of England ask for their churches to be.

As an aside, there was a tragedy in 1934 when workmen were repairing the tower and had a length of cable sprawled out across the road for whatever reason. This little arrangement wasn’t conducted with much care and a local man and grocer, William Humphrey Grimble, was killed when he drove into the cable on his motorcycle.